Fellow journalist – oops, I mean Town Manager Tom Lynch - broke the news in his weekly municipal blog last Friday that TheBarnstable Enterprise published its final edition that day. In so doing, Lynch nearly scooped The Barnstable Patriot, which managed a brief 11th hour farewell editorialand The Cape Cod Times, which evidently did not see it as a breaking Cape-wide news event requiring immediate attention.

Here’s what Lynch wrote, in case you missed it: “This week the Enterprise Newspapers announced it is ending production of its weekly paper, The Barnstable Enterprise, due to declining advertising revenues. The Barnstable Enterprise published its final weekly edition today.

“I have enjoyed working with Laura Reckford, editor for the Barnstable edition over the last three years. Laura embraced Barnstable, and seemed to be everywhere in town. From Town Council meetings to July 4th parades and everything in between with her notebook and camera in hand, she did a tremendous job in presenting town news.

“I enjoyed our weekly meetings to discuss happenings in Town Hall. She is an accomplished writer whose consistency, dedication and integrity will certainly carry with her wherever she heads next. The Enterprise Newspapers will continue to publish papers in Bourne, Falmouth, Mashpee and Sandwich. Of course newspaper readers can continue to find news of the town in The Barnstable Patriot.”

Does Lynch have a gender bias? He lavishes Reckford with the kind of praise usually reserved for obituaries, resumes and references but mentions not one word…not one…not one…not one word about a veteran reporter tirelessly toiling the trenches of Barnstable nearly as long as Lynch has.

Did not reporter James Kinsella also seem “to be everywhere in town?” Did he not write clearly and simply so all could understand complicated municipal rhetoric? Was he not civil to all? Even a notorious killer deserved a prefix of “Mr.” – a social grace this column would never bestow upon a criminal, crooked politician or common thug.

Did not Jim Kinsella create a familiar and endearing character of his own roaming up to the speaker’s podium at council meetings with his signature shirttail hanging down from one side of his trousers giving the disheveled look of one entirely preoccupied by his labors? Politicians roll up their sleeves. Kinsella let his shirttail hang out.

This writer had the pleasure of working with Kinsella at the Cape Cod Times for many years when he was business editor. Like every reporter or editor I’ve ever known, he had his share of eccentricities (for lack of a kinder word) just like the rest of us. But they didn’t affect, to this writer’s knowledge, his commitment to accuracy, fairness and compassion, virtues also shared by Barnstable Patriot editors David Still and Ed Maroney and the rest of the staff, this merciless opinion writer excluded.

I say these things not to diminish Lynch’s assessment of Reckford, but to spread it also to a dedicated small-town journalist who has made his way through personal adversities in the business without losing his sense of the greater purpose of his calling.

He and I had a confrontation once. I had written a feature on the produce market in Boston. I had awakened at 2 a.m. to ride there in a fruit truck with a fruitcake driving it. It was fun. It was work. It was a tiring day. I composed the story and shipped it over to Kinsella, then business editor.

Sometime later he approached my desk and kindly noted the story was a bit too long for the space he had allotted in the business section. He asked that I “trim” it. “You’re the editor,” I said with a touch of annoyance. “You want it trimmed, then you trim it.”

An hour or so later, he came to my desk again. He told me he had read the entire story and that it was such an easy read he decided not to trim it. If I never thanked him for that gesture, I’m doing it now to finally get it off my chest and give Jim Kinsella his due, which is more than he got from Lynch for some odd reason.

They say TheBarnstable Enterprise was felled by a decline in advertising. Well, certainly not because of the journalism of its staff. And thereby hangs a more important tale. Small-town weekly newspapers, as their cosmopolitan counterparts, are all suffering from revenue declines in a mixed-media marketplace.

I personally find it strange that small-town newspapers that do so much with so little do not generate more enthusiastic advertising support from the business community. These newspapers rarely say no when asked to freely publicize all the good things that make a community what it is and ferret out the bad so it can be corrected.

Local business needs to support their local newspaper with an uptick in advertising. It won’t break them. To this the demise of the Barnstable Enterprise attests.